A while back, Terri over at
Going to the Country had a post about the holidays not stacking up to the ones that we remember from years past. I replied in her comments with this quote:
There's a line in the movie Garden State that has made a ton of sense for me lately:
"You know that point in your life when you realize that the house that you grew up in isn't really your home anymore? ...It just sort of happens one day, one day and it's just gone. And you can never get it back. It's like you get homesick for a place that doesn't exist. I mean it's like this rite of passage, you know. You won't have this feeling again until you create a new idea of home for yourself, you know, for you kids, for the family you start, it's like a cycle or something. I miss the idea of it. Maybe that's all family really is. A group of people who miss the same imaginary place."
I've been thinking about this a lot lately. Sometimes the memory of something is so powerful that you forget what it was really like. It's like when you remember the house being so big when you were a child, and you get there and it's actually on the small side.
This is really something that hit me this year. In the last 12 months, I lost my grandparents, had a miscarriage, and we lost our house, and in the midst of it all when I needed the support and emotional stability of a familiar place, I went back to my parents house and nothing was the same. Emotionally and physically.
The house has been reno-ed, so the look is extremely different. My parents are different too. My Dad is making more money now than he did when I was a kid, so things are different there too. It's strange seeing the things that they buy, and remembering that my Mom would buy things at the dollar store because she had to, not because she wanted to. And since my Dad lost both his Mom and Dad within months of each other, he's become a different guy. He's more open, and more willing to share his feelings. Home is not the same place that it used to be. It's not better and it's not a bad place, it's different. I go home, and My bedroom is now my brother's. I sleep in the den on a futon. It's not My House anymore.
There is a tradition in my hometown that if you are in town, you go to the Franklin Hotel bar on the 24th of December. It's a chance to meet old friends and reconnect with them. The people that I used to be friends with are all different now. We care about different things, and that's cool, I mean people have to grow, and change, but some of them have stagnated. I mean that they are the same person they were 5 or 10 years ago. They still are in the same place with the same people and doing the same things that they were before. So the people that I wanted to feel safe and comfortable with, were no longer safe or comfortable. The worst of it, is that I am made to feel badly that I wanted to leave and make a different life for myself. That I wanted to "get off the farm" is a terrible choice.
I hope that I have made changes, both good and bad, and uncovered different facets of myself in the last 10 years, and that this self-discovery and exploration has allowed me to see the world in a new light. I am able to be a better person because of it.
Ugh, I rant about the things that I can't change or that I have no control over.
